A million times this. There is “private” as a corporate-legality licensing perspective. There is “private” as a human concept. The two are seemingly opposite, yet as all the money is focused on the former there’s no airtime left for the latter.

Then I'm interested if there are any facts as to what ZDR actually means?

It can still mean Zero Data Retention - i just comes down to whether you trust the company to actually do what they promise.

The fact that they've trained models on data that wasn't theirs does not make me trust them a lot when they make this claim.

When discussing this, may I ask (I know you are probably bored of the actual arguments), what does "trained models on data that wasn't theirs" actually mean in practice?

Again, I know these arguments have been done to death, but every human who reads source code that wasn't written by them, or views art that wasn't created by them, and practices against this art, is training their brain on data "that wasn't theirs".

They are frequently making a living doing so.

Is this distinction the scale, or is there actually a different more strict definition that we should be using as a common language to talk about this? As in, I should not even be reading certain source code if it is not licensed appropriate, or I will be in breach because I'm training myself illegally? And the same question for art, etc?

In general humans don't have perfect recall. Even people with what we might call a photographic memory don't have the ability to memorise millions of lines of code and output them with little effort.

It hinges somewhat on the concept of how much you believe things are being learned and how much is just pattern matching and borrowing a solution from memory. Certainly in the early days of Copilot it was possible to get it to output chunks of open source code near verbatim.

I think, generally, people are probably closer to believing that there is some kind of reasoning being carried out by these models than in those early days but it would also be easy to strip all of the immediately identifiable comments etc from the training materials to make it harder to detect.

If it outputs copyrighted material, which it does handily, then it doesn’t really matter.

> how much is just pattern matching and borrowing a solution from memory.

It's easy to show that this is not the case. This is a well-known phenomenon in ML, known as generalization - specifically, compositional generalization. See e.g. https://research.google/blog/measuring-compositional-general... for a description - although note that that post is from 2020, and models have become much better at this since then.

People can "believe" what they want, but there's plenty of work that definitively falsifies beliefs about "borrowing a solution from memory".

A product is not a human. They are selling a product based off copy-righted material without the rights to it. It's a pretty easy line to draw, honestly.

Why is something being human or not relevant here?

Because the laws were written by humans for humans, and that's where they seem to be drawing the line

I don't think it is easy, otherwise this wouldn't be such a contentious and frequently discussed issue.

A human who trains their brain on material they don't own then creates art or writes code based on this training, sells the product too.

Which is not illegal to do. It becomes illegal if you directly use or reference the material in your product. Consuming copyrighted material personally is fully legal, training a model on that same copy-righted material is illegal. Where is the contention?

(Not a lawyer, just a nerd)

>Consuming copyrighted material personally is fully legal, training a model on that same copy-righted material is illegal. Where is the contention?

The contention is obvious in your statement. Is it illegal to train a model, and why? Why is it legal to train a human on copyright material and then sell those skills, vs training a computer and selling the skills?

This isn't black and white.

Once they feed your data into the training dataset, they can delete the individualized copy. The training dataset is, of course, a trade secret that can never be exposed without causing serious harm to the company's model, or equivalent legalese that will prevent it's disclosure to all, governments included.

The curiosity is that these companies somehow got around crimes and are above law (1) and these crimes mean something in a limited jurisdiction, like copyright laws of USA/Canada are not world’s (2). So it’s all cyberpunk at this point.

Copyright violation is not per se a crime. I think a colorable defense of fair use, even if it would fail in a civil trial, would negate the mens rea element. I can't easily find caselaw or articles regarding this, though, as most criminal copyright cases involve straightforward reproduction and distribution schemes. Maybe that's because prosecutors won't press cases that might raise a question of fair use?

But I agree with your larger point. AI companies have copied Uber's aggressive posture, pushing the legal envelope with expectations of positive return. Surely they'll continue doing the same in other areas.